A redditor's thoughts on halo 4 and 343.

Games Other Halo
1

I saw this on reddit and it was one of the best reads iv’e ever had. In coming long read.

Here’s the original post if anyone’s interested.

> So, I guess I have to start with Halo 2. Halo 2 was the pinnacle of fun gaming to me for multiple reasons, but to avoid rose-colored glasses, I’m gonna stick to just gameplay and general multiplayer topics for this.
> Halo 2’s gameplay (post-update, BR starts) was simple: every man starts equal, and power weapons are placed around the map in timed spawns (sort of… they actually improved on this in H3). Whether you’re playing slayer or oddball or flag, this promotes map control and map movement (if you let them get the rockets, they might slay you and score a flag, etc…).
> Halo 2’s gameplay was made greater by excellent maps. Open sight lines, clear positions of power (with decently placed weapons), and a general lack of clutter made for a CONSISTENT, fun experience. That’s not to say all the maps were good, but this game had Lockout, Midship, Sanctuary, and Turf in it. Amongst a lot of other great maps.
> Halo 2 also debuted a fun matchmaking system. You compete (in a consistent game) against peers your equal. That was awesome to me. I love that. You win or lose, based on skill. It was sweet.
> Halo 2 was also buggy, and featured tons and tons of cheating. It wasn’t perfect, but when it worked, it WORKED.
> Halo 2 also featured my favorite playlist ever, Team Hardcore. This was a playlist of fairly competitive settings (but not MLG settings!), that didn’t stray from the core game, but still was tuned to be more competitive (removed radar requiring more team chat, different objective gametype settings).
> Halo 3 was also pretty awesome. I’m gonna skip through this to get to the Halo 4 stuff, but it was mostly similar to Halo 2, except it added in some stuff that was largely ineffectual (regen pickup, etc). This stuff changed the game some, some hated it, I never really noticed it much. It was meh. The BR was slightly less fun in this because it had a spread and wasn’t hitscan (that really sucked, but in retrospect, I would gladly take that compared to stuff now), the maps were decent (more cluttery) but forge was sweet, and the matchmaking (IMO) was slightly better than Halo 2’s. It also got rid of 99% of cheating and host problems. It didn’t quite have Halo 2’s charm, but it certainly was serviceable, fun, and competitive.
> Then Reach. -Yoink- Reach.
> -Yoinking!- Reach.
> Reach made me realize so many small things about Halo made such a huge difference in gameplay. I’ll start small (ish). They removed melee and grenade bleed through (I think nades at least, I don’t remember perfectly), meaning if you got meleed or naded when you had any amount of shield left, you would only take shield damage. This was -Yoinking!- absurd. Goddamnit I’m still pissed thinking about this. This meant that if you were in CQC, and you shot, and the other guy meleed, he would win because one melee removed shield in that game. You were essentially down a melee. It meant that if you ran up to someone, double meleeing was more effective than shooting them. That removed all skill from CQC. -Yoink- that. CQC used to be a dance of shooting and meleeing at the right moment. One false step and you lose. It was a skill. People played Boxer just to be better at it. This killed that.
> Then there was bloom. asdklfjkl;asdj. Bloom. you know, I was about to -Yoink- about this a lot, then I realized its not really in Halo 4, so forget it. I hate it, -Yoink- bloom, whatever.
> Armor Abilities were the biggest, and most -Yoink- change in this game. They remove the “every man starts equal”. Now every man starts different. That doesn’t seem like a big deal. But what it does is remove consistency from the game. Oh, you threw a great nade and removed a dudes shield? Armor lock. Oh, you gained a great position on the map, providing superior cover against the other team? Jetpack. Oh, you went around a corner and got assassinated by a dude in camo? That’s -Yoinking!- sweet. Its not competitive, its cheap. Because you are essentially starting with a power weapon, but its not communicated in any way. The enemy has no way of knowing until you reveal it, allowing you to get an edge without working for it. You aren’t winning by skill, you’re winning because you started with a trump card. And don’t get me wrong, I adapted, I used the cheapest AA’s I could, because I play to win. But it took out a lot of fun. It wasn’t competitive.
> The maps also blew in this game, but hey, we’re not talking about Reach.
> Reach also started the destruction of matchmaking. While it had matchmaking, there were no skill based ranks. This removed that other essence of fun to me; playing a competitive game, competitively. Now when you win its not because you played a fair match, its because you joined up with your Halo 2 friends and stomped some noobs. Fun at first, but it gets old super quick.

2

> Halo 4 is worse than Reach. By a lot.
> Geez I don’t even know where to start. If Reach got rid of every man starting fair, 4 pissed on its grave. You know start with a unique loadout that you select, out of a primary, secondary, and some COD-esque perks. None of this is communicated to the enemy. They have no idea if you have more powerful grenades, if you have a better radar, if you have less flinch. Oh -Yoink- that’s right there’s flinch now. When you got shot in the old games while zoomed in, you would get zoomed out. You’re punished for being shot, but you can still continue the fight fairly. In 4, if you get shot, your aim just recoils. Quite a bit sometimes. Enough that in long range DMR battles, if you get shot first, your odds of fighting back are real, real low. Anyways, you have no idea of knowing who has what anymore.
> On top of that, Halo 4 killed my other favorite part of Halo, map control. No longer do weapons spawn on timers in known areas of the map, promoting movement and teamwork. Nope. Aside from some initial guaranteed weapons spawns at the very start, weapons spawn at random, in random spots. Pure luck which team gets them. For instance, I played a game of slayer where a teammate had a sniper. A sniper then spawned right next to me at random. The game WAS tied 20-20, and we went on to win 60-38. Wonder if those two snipers had anything to do with it?
> Even worse, in slayer, you now get “ordnance drops” that unlock after x amount of kills or points or whatever the -Yoink- it is. These ordnance drops have random weapons/powerups in them that you can select. This is how weapons are spawned in slayer. Keep in mind, its random. sometimes you’ll get a rocket, and sometimes you’ll get plasma grenades. Now that’s fair.
> Furthermore, in most gametypes, there is instant respawn. seriously, you die, and respawn instantly. There is no reward for killing an enemy; you don’t get their power weapons (those disappear almost instantly in this game, 12 seconds if I remember correct), and they don’t STAY dead in most gametypes (I think CTF has like a 3 second respawn). There’s no punishment for dying. You don’t even lose map position because… there’s no reason to control a map. In my experience, most CTF games (especially on -Yoinking!- Adrift) devolve into “score and camp”.
> On top of this, 343 saw fit to add super cheap versions of every exisiting power weapon. They added a 1sk sniper (hit them at all and they die), a higher dps AR (kills in about 1-2s, not sure, but its real fast), a more powerful rocket launcher (incineration cannon), and I think there’s another gun I’m forgetting. These aren’t fun to go up against; they kill you before you have a chance to fight back. It’s also worth noting that in general, you have less health in this game than the previous games. Kill times are probably 3-4s, whereas they used to be 4s+ for standard weapons. Combine this with flinch (where you don’t really have a good chance to fight back at range), and maybe you’re starting to understand my hatred of this game.
> There’s also the boltshot. A pistol that charges up as a shotgun at close range, that kills in one shot if you are halfway decent with it. It charges up very quickly, and you can spawn with it. you can essentially spawn with a shotgun. I can’t remember the last time I had a melee battle in this game; there’s no reason to melee when there’s the boltshot.
> Grenades are also insanely weak in this game, although this wouldn’t be nearly as bad if it wasn’t for all the other crap.
> So after eviscerating any form of competitive gameplay, 343 saw fit to destroy matchmaking. There is still no ranking system. Worse, there’s no “making”. There’s just matching, then you’re in a lobby with the same group of people until they decide to quit. Why would I want to play the same people again? If you want us to be able to do that, put a “rematch” option after the game instead of just matching us up together. Its so -Yoinking!- dumb. Even worse, games now feature “join mid-game”, which sounds cool at first. Someone on your team quits, and you should get a replacement. Except that in reality, this sucks. Because you often join games that are half done, where your team is getting creamed because everyone has quit. And games will start with teams being 4v3, 5v3, whatever. I’ve started multiple games 4v1. The matchmaking is straight -Yoinked!- up. Its the capstone of -Yoink- on this game. Its unreal. No ranking system is idiotic to me… but to remove the crux of Halo online experience for years? The thing people loved? WHY???
> Why? That’s all I can ask. That’s all I can wonder. Why these changes? To get the COD crowd? All they did was alienate old fans, and remove so much depth and fun to the game. I don’t think I even touched on all the things that piss me off. Oh wait, I forgot.
> The playlists and maps blow. The playlists are garbage: you can choose between slayer, big team slayer, ctf, oddball, koth, regicide, and swat. No “team objective”, no “team hardcore”, no combination gametype playlists. No genre playlists. Just gametypes. stupid. The maps also suck. They’re all huge, and have incredibly obstructed sight lines. Incredibly, absurdly huge, mind you.
> Oh yeah, and sprint is now a mandatory ffeature. You can’t get rid of it. Everyone has it, permanently. It just slows down gameplay IMO, because people have a slower base running speed, and you can only fight will running at base speed. It’s not huge to me, but I don’t like it.
> Also they removed a ton of gametypes. No assault. No 1 flag. No classic flag. why? why?
> I just don’t get 343. I hate Halo 4. I do. I tried to love it. this was what I got on the night of release. http://imgur.com/HvyKw[1] . I was stupidly excited for this game. I thought anything could be better than Reach. I thought they would do right, maybe freshen the game up. I really wouldn’t mind ordnance drops if they did them in a more intelligent way (rather than distribute power weapons through them, distribute side-grades). So don’t let people tell you I’m just a hater. I’ve loved Halo since Halo 1. Halo 2 will always be my favorite multiplayer. I’ve read all the books. I -Yoinking!- love Halo.
> I just hate Halo 4. -Yoink-.

3

Halo 4’s not half bad, but anyway… I agree with most of that.

4

I love this post. Especially right at the end where he says that it’s not even the idea of new features that he hates. It’s the unintelligent way they executed those features (though he specifically mentions ordinance).

And it’s true. Every new feature 343i implemented could have been done a BETTER way, that would NOT have contributed to Halo 4 being a bad game. Instead Ordinance is completely random, and gives you overpowered choices, map spawns are terrible because of just that one word: Random, and Loadouts are terrible because they gave you to wide a range of possible variety.

They are all things that could have been done in a healthy, good way and actually made Halo 4 a better game, instead 343i decided to go with the chaotic “blow it up” method and, while fun and exhilerating, it RUINS any ability this game has of staying popular for long. The random gets old, the “extreme power” in every player’s hands becomes more a nuisance than a fun time. And the more you play, the more frustrated you become.

5

This post makes me sad.

Halo 2 is gone, Halo 3 is pretty much dead, and Halo Reach just isn’t up to par.

There’s nowhere left to go.

I could try getting into some other competitive game, but it just wouldn’t feel the same.

6

Agreed OP, balance and ranks if done right couldhave saved 343 soo much grief.

I cant even play it right now since nearly ever facet of this game is broken in some way. I made it to the tier 1 finals of the -Yoink!- tourney and you know what?
after that, I felt so burned out that once in the finals, I didn’t even want to play a single match of it…

7

> This post makes me sad.
>
> Halo 2 is gone, Halo 3 is pretty much dead, and Halo Reach just isn’t up to par.
>
> There’s nowhere left to go.
>
> I could try getting into some other competitive game, but it just wouldn’t feel the same.

You could you know just join tournaments online and stuff it snot like MLG’s god in buisness form.

8

Great post… until it said Halo 4 is worse than Reach. Then it lost all credibility.

Two of my favorite halo memories are: Halo 1 LAN Parties and Halo 2 MLG Customs/Team Hardcore Playlist.

9

In case anyone was wondering, the guy who originally posted that made it to the FRONT PAGE!

The best part? It wasn’t even a thread, it was a comment that made it to the front page. The thread is also at the top, by a large margin, in that subreddit.

10

This post has been edited by a moderator. Please refrain from making non-constructive posts.

*Original post. Click at your own discretion.

yep, Halo is a dead DUCK.

Enjoy the $$ -Yoink!- cause YOU AIN’T gettin NO MORE OF MINE.

11

> I love this post. Especially right at the end where he says that it’s not even the idea of new features that he hates. It’s the unintelligent way they executed those features (though he specifically mentions ordinance).
>
> And it’s true. Every new feature 343i implemented could have been done a BETTER way, that would NOT have contributed to Halo 4 being a bad game. Instead Ordinance is completely random, and gives you overpowered choices, map spawns are terrible because of just that one word: Random, and Loadouts are terrible because they gave you to wide a range of possible variety.
>
> They are all things that could have been done in a healthy, good way and actually made Halo 4 a better game, instead 343i decided to go with the chaotic “blow it up” method and, while fun and exhilerating, it RUINS any ability this game has of staying popular for long. The random gets old, the “extreme power” in every player’s hands becomes more a nuisance than a fun time. And the more you play, the more frustrated you become.

I agree and really its not just up to 343 to fix it its up to us as fans to tell them how we want it to be fixed not by completely stripping the game of what it is but by modifying wha we have to make something we all can enjoy. Ive been trying to preach this for weeks but no one wants to try its like there lazy there are a few gems out there that have tried and experimented from what ive seen on the internet and the forums but overall the vibe im getting is " instead of trying to save it and make our money worth something lets just argue with whoever goes against our rage and damn this game to hell even if it can be fixed.

12

> This post makes me sad.
>
> Halo 2 is gone, Halo 3 is pretty much dead, and Halo Reach just isn’t up to par.
>
> There’s nowhere left to go.
>
> I could try getting into some other competitive game, but it just wouldn’t feel the same.

That’s actually how I feel at moment, I feel like I’m stuck in Limbo.

13

Wow. The writer points out majority of the issues I have with multiplayer. The writer never got to mentioning the removal of firefight. After reading the article and seeing all the flaws with MP that continue to bother me, I’m done with Halo 4 MP. Unless something major happens, there are better Halo MP games that still have active servers.

14

Am I the only person on these forums who enjoys Halo 4?

15

> Am I the only person on these forums who enjoys Halo 4?

I enjoy the game too. I really like the MLG v1 settings. People who are upset with the game are far more likely though to go on a forum and complain about it. People who enjoy the game, will often just play the game.

16

wow. Another glorified post about halo 2. Didn’t see that coming.

17

I added a link to the original post if anyone wants to give him any up votes.

18

> wow. Another glorified post about halo 2. Didn’t see that coming.

I’m guessing you didn’t read all of it, please read the whole thing before you start bashing something.

19

Want my response to redditor’s post. I…Do…Not…Care. Why? If i bought Halo 4, i bought it for my own reasons. I don’t need a testament on whats wrong about the game or why it sucks. if you do not like it, then go to a nearby gamestop and return it. That is all. Same thing with MLG, i dont need a so-called pro to tell me why not to get the game or not to play it, if i play it, then it was my decision.

20

He nailed a good chunck of it. If your a casual, you probably wont care or listen to the facts.